14 DAY TRIAL // A new version of Sun Microsystems’ VirtualBox is available today, bringing Teleportation, a feature that allows for the live migration of a VM session from one machine to another. Additionally, VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one. New snapshots can also be taken from other snapshots, these being just a few key additions typical to this Beta release of the software.
Unlike Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, VirtualBox is free to download and use for anyone packing the necessary hardware. The software is a feature-rich, high-performance product for enterprise customers. Available as Open Source Software, VirtualBox is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Download links are available at the bottom of this article for getting the latest version of Sun Microsystem’s VitrualBox, or the VirtualBox Software Development Kit.
According to the release notes, VirtualBox 3.1.0 Beta 3 brings 2D video acceleration for Windows guests, in addition to the aforementioned enhancements. Users are required to employ the host video hardware for overlay stretching and color conversion, says Sun. The developer also added more flexible storage attachments, meaning that CD/DVD drives can now be attached to arbitrary storage controllers, and there can be more than one such drive. As usual, there’s more documentation in the Help menu to be reviewed for each new feature.
The makers of the Java platform also added support for Parallels version 2 disk image (HDD) files, the changelog continues to reveal. The network attachment type can now be changed while a VM is running, while network performance for Linux guests has been enhanced.
Experimental support has been implemented for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher, as well as for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). Lastly, Sun outlines that significant performance improvements have been made for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal), although more tests are needed to confirm good functionality. A complete list of changes, including bug fixes, can be found here.